Monthly Archives: October 2017

New-born enterprises have limited funds and limited time – if the funds run out before the product is proven they die. So the basic philosophy of the start-up entrepreneur is risk mitigation. Here are some other key precepts...

I’d like to tell you a story about how 13 grams of wood and the tears of a 10-year-old changed the way I look at success. Suspending Disbelief When my daughter was six years old I started coaching her in a program called Destination Imagination. It’s a creative problem-solving program that teaches kids how to think creatively by giving them ...

The more strategy development work I do with organizations, the more I’m becoming aware of a prevalent pattern, a pattern which I find counterproductive, even detrimental. It concerns the starting point for their strategy work: in nearly every case, they begin with convergent thinking, the polar opposite of divergent thinking, which I believe is the kind of thinking true strategy ...

The principles of running a business are fairly straightforward. You create clear objectives, achieve them efficiently and try to get better as you go. Business school professors have fancy names for this stuff, like “strategic DNA,” “core competencies” and “continuous improvement,” but in a nutshell all that stuff means is that you try to do things better, faster and cheaper. The ...

These books provide a roadmap and a compass that will forever change the way you look at entrepreneurism, innovation, marketing, and change. Some people learn entrepreneurship from their family business; others learn it by studying entrepreneurship in school. I did neither. Instead, I was enrolled in the “learn while you burn” program of entrepreneurship. When my partner and I started ...

It often puzzles me the lack of investment we make in coaching, mentoring, or even facilitating around innovation, it simply is not enough with the use of an external innovation expert accelerating the process, stimulating the thinking and learning.

From an innovation standpoint, any innovator would be glad to find out that one’s creation continued to amaze future generations for hundreds of years. Yet I was struck by another analogy for innovation and the moai that could be relevant for modern practitioners.